In early Roman times, campaigns used public debate and canvassing to win elections. The debates were “semi-formal meetings,” at which loud “political passion” was so involved that once a crow “which had the bad luck to be flying past” (I believe that’s a Mary Beard joke) “fell to the ground, stunned.”

In the second century BCE, a candidate named Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica (You can forget the name now; he’s not important. In fact, self doesn’t know why she bothered to type out the entire name rather than identifying him as PCSN) “was out canvassing one day in a bid to be elected to the office of” blah blah “and was busy shaking the hands of voters . . . when he came across one whose hands were hardened by work in the fields. ‘My goodness,’ PCSN joked, do you walk on them?’ He was overheard and the common people concluded that he had been taunting their poverty and their labour. The upshot, needless to say, was that he lost the election.”

#lol

SPQR p. 192: only the rich could afford to run for public office (Campaigns, then as now, are expensive) but “success . . . was a gift bestowed by the poor.”

Fed
Up so long and variously by
Our age’s fancy narrative concoctions,
I yearned for the kind of unseasoned telling found
In legends, fairy tales, a tone licked clean
Over the centuries by mild old tongues,
Grandam to cub, serene, anonymous.
. . . So my narrative
Wanted to be limpid, unfragmented;
My characters, conventional stock figures
Afflicted to a minimal degree
With personality and past experience —
A witch, a hermit, innocent young lovers,
The kinds of being we recall from Grimm,
Jung, Verdi, and the commedia dell’arte.

— James Merrill, excerpt from the long poem The Changing Light at Sandover

It’s a wonderful name for a writer. Maybe if self was a man, she would still like to be called Mary Beard.

Anyhoo, in SPQR, Mary Beard tells us that the Imperial Roman Army was divided into centuries (So that’s where that word comes from!). These centuries were not all equal: even the rich served, so in the army the top “eighty centuries of men” were from “the richest, first class, who fought in a full kit of heavy bronze armour.”

Following these were four more centuries, “wearing progressively lighter armour” (“the richer you are, the more substantial and expensive equipment you can provide for yourself”).

The lowest class of centuries “fought with just slings and stones.”

The “very poorest . . . were entirely exempt from military service.”

#Huh

Would the reasoning go something like: The rich have the most to lose, so they would make the best warriors. The poorest class have nothing to lose, so we can’t trust them to defend the motherland with the same determination (Plus, if they can’t afford their own armor, the poor things would be killed quite handily)

Thinking of the modern-day American Army, it is an all-volunteer Army. No rich man needs to fight. Neither do the children of the rich.

You will see that certain states are more well-represented than others. Such as, for instance, West Virginia. Most people who sign up for the Army do so because they can’t afford to pay for college on their own; if they sign up, the Army will pay for college. So, they take their chances.

(Self has seen recruiting stations in malls in Daly City and South San Francisco, NEVER in Palo Alto, Cupertino, Menlo Park, etc etc Not even in downtown San Francisco. Need you ask why?)

This organization had a parallel in the voting structure (At least Imperial Rome recognized the vote!): Each century had just one block vote (like our American electoral college): “If they stuck together , the eighty centuries of the richest, first class . . . could outvote all the other classes put together . . . The richest citizens were far fewer in number than the poor, but they were divided among eighty centuries, as against the twenty or thirty for the more populous lower classes, or the single century for the mass of the very poorest.”

The Roman Senate gradually became what we might now describe as a decidedly multicultural body, and the full list of Roman emperors contains many whose origins lay outside Italy: Caracalla’s father, Septimius Severus, was the first Emperor from Roman territory in Africa; Trajan and Hadrian, who reigned half a century earlier, had come from the Roman province of Spain . . . Rome had been open to foreigners from the beginning.